I found myself frustrated whenever I looked at it, because I knew something drastic had to change. What followed was basically a month or more of working on anything but the interface. I was trapped my 1.0 interface, but I couldn’t figure out what needed to be done to fix it. The inequities between the square corners of the list view and the round corners of the details box made it hard to embed anything more complicated than the few standard controls I have in there now. The interface was not suited to evolution. Hey, that was a nice piece of work for a newbie UI designer who is just trying to get something out the door. I had never designed toolbar icons before, so I felt pretty good about the matte blue stencils I came up with using NodeBox. I was pretty happy with FlexTime 1.0 when I released it. For reference, this is what I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with before embarking on this journey: You have got to be dissatisfied with something before you can make it better. You can rub sticks together for an eternity, but if you’re not cold, you’ll never start a fire. If you’re not convinced that your UI needs an overhaul, then you might as well forget it. That might sound fluffy, but it’s absolutely critical. I’m going to go over the steps that made up the redesign in roughly chronological order, including links to existing open source packages that I used, and also releasing some small contributions of my own for your review.īefore anything else, you’ve got to be inspired to change. But looking back I can see a lot of discrete obstacles that I had to overcome, and perhaps my path through the wilderness will prove helpful to you. And also like everything in life, it seems a lot easier once you’ve done it. How did I accomplish all of the little things that add up to the new UI? Like everything else in life, you just bite off a little bit at a time, and hope for the best. Some readers pointed out that in announcing FlexTime 1.1, along with its snazzy new interface, I left out some of the most interesting details to programmers.

Debt quencher microsoft